directing his comments over the heads of his cheering supporters and toward the TV cameras. "But I want to thank you for moving that promise you made in Jackson Square forward." The morning after the election, be- fore a small group of reporters in the community room of a Treme church, N agin did not address the question of whether some parts of the city might have to be abandoned. "People are start- ing to say, 'Well, maybe there are parts of town that can't come back,'" he said. But he wasn't going to force it. Invok- ing eminent domain would be political suicide. Withholding services would be certain to prompt civil-rights lawsuits. "We're not going to choke people out of city services," Nagin said. "Everything that's getting city services now will con- tinue to get them." He didn't specify how the devastated city would extend schools, garbage pickup, buses, and other services to homes widely dis- persed amid acres of wreckage. Three new committees, which included a cou- ple of Republicans who had run against him, would take up those details. This was a day to celebrate, he said; Presi- dent Bush had just called and was "pretty excited" about the election re- sults. "I think the opportunity has pre- sented itself for me to kind of go down in history as the mayor that guided the city ofN ew Orleans through an incred- ible rebuild cycle, and really eliminated a lot of the pre- Katrina problems that we had with blight, with crime, with the public-school system." T hat evening, I drove east from the French Qgarter, downriver, along St. Claude Avenue and into the Ninth Ward. St. Claude was busy, but when I turned north onto Alvar Street, into the area that flooded, I found myself in a ghost town. As I crossed the Claiborne Avenue Bridge into the Lower Nine. I could see, from the peak of the bridge, the freshly repaired breach in the In- dustrial Canal. The Army Corps of En- gineers had mounded the levee there higher than before, and built along its top a white concrete floodwall that from above looked as thin as paper. Three recent studies of New Orleans's flood-protection system make grim reading. A University of California at Berkeley study found that the Army Corps of Engineers-pressed by the contrary demands of "better, faster, and cheaper" -had over the years done such a bad job of building and managing New Orleans's levees and floodwalls that, even with post- Katrina repairs, the city remained in as much peril as before. The corps itself, in a report of more than six thousand pages, acknowl- edged that it had built a hurricane-pro- tection system "in name only," and that it had done almost everything wrong, from assessing risk to choosing technol- ogies. An article in the journal Nature found that the city and its levees are sinking into the Mississippi Delta mud much faster than anyone thought. In some places, the authors wrote, New Orleans is sinking by an inch a year, and some parts of the levee system are now three feet lower than their builders in- tended. In the following months, there was more bad news. Street violence grew so alarming-five teen -agers were shot dead in a single incident one night-that Mayor N agin had to call in the National Guard to help patrol the streets. As much as two billion dollars in federal disaster relief was discovered to have been wasted or stolen, and last week a survey found that little more than a third of the pre- Katrina popula- tion had returned. The fate of the Lower Ninth Ward and the rest of the city remains anyone's guess. New Or- leanians tend to talk about the pros- pects of another devastating flood in the fatalistic way that people in the fifties talked about nuclear war. They know that they are living under the ever-pres- ent threat of annihilation. They want the people in power to do all they can to prevent it. But, in the meantime, there's nothing to do but soldier on. A few days ago, Ronald Lewis left a cheerful message on my answering machine: "Dan, we have rededicated the House of Dance and Feathers!" On my last night in New Orleans, I crisscrossed eastward, away from the breach. Most of the wrecked houses that had blocked the street had been re- moved; on only a few blocks did I have to back up to detour around a bungalow listing across the pavement. Debris crunched under my tires. Street lights were on, but no lights shone from win- dows. Doors stood open to dark interi- ors. On Lizardi Street, a half dozen young black men sat in the gloom on the front steps of a ruined house. They wore brilliant-white T-shirts as big as muumuus and heavy jewelry that spar- kled in the dim light. Two doors down, on an unlit porch, a seventy-three-year- old homeowner named Ernest Penns sat slumped in an old kitchen chair. He wore glasses and had a full head of spiky gray hair, and the gold in his crooked brown teeth looked as if it had been applied with a garden trowel. He said that he didn't need anything, and patted a heavy leather-bound Bible in his lap. "I got everything I need right here." He led me inside. The single- story bungalow was lit by a battery- powered camping lantern. It smelled heavily of mildew and chlorine. "I washed the walls down with bleach," he said, gesturing at the panelling. I asked ifhe worried about the mold that was blooming inside the walls. "This is not the worst thing that's ever happened to me," he said. He pulled up his T-shirt to reveal a boiling purple scar. "In 1972, I was stabbed with a screwdriver. Drove myself to the hospital." The incident had made him stop drinking and become a Christian, he said. Twelve years later, he had saved enough to buy this house, for thirty-six thousand dollars. Now, with many more years of payments on it, he was getting by on Social Security. He had water ser- vice but no electricity or gas, so he drove across the Industrial Canal a couple of times a day to get something to eat at a Wendy's or a Subway. We walked back onto the porch, and he kicked aside a can of TAT Roach & Ant Killer so that I could sit down. The street light on the corner flickered. A gold Lexus with compli- cated free-moving hubcaps, its sub- woofers booming like a giant heart, screeched to a halt at the house two doors up. Penns and I listened to the young men laughing and shouting to each other. "They're plying their trade," he said. "They're not what we need around here, but they're part of this community, and it's something we can't control." A police car rolled by once in a while, he said. I asked him how often. "About every five days." I felt my way down the steps and said goodbye. Penns raised a hand and waved, barely visible in the gloom. . THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 21, 2006 59